Mean Regression

Mean Regression

The Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup going away. They final game was a blowout. The two final teams played well to get to the finals, but it looked as if the Panthers were just exhausted with the effort.

Neither team was supposed to be there; the teams with the great players --Toronto, Edmonton, Colorado--never came close. So, the playoffs could not showcase the games stars. Such is the advantage--and price --of parity.

Hockey has reached parity. Every team is limited to spending the same amount every year; more money for superstars means less for the other players. So, some teams are top-heavy, others homogenous. And any team can beat any other. The competition will be tough and close.

But, as with all socialism, no brilliance.

Provorov

 

The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution. To dress up present-day people in the costumes and labels of history and symbolically try to undo the past is to surpass Don Quixote and jeopardize reality in the name of visions.--Sowell

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YouTubers said they destroyed over 100 VHS tapes of an obscure 1987 movie to increase the value of their final copy. They sold it on eBay for $80,600.

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The Northernmost part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the Southernmost part of Brazil.

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Provorov

Provorov declined to participate in the Flyer's Pride Night and sat out the warmup with the gay pride jersey. He cited religious reasons. This was a promotion night for hockey and Provorov said, while he respected everyone, he was not doing promotions.

He received an avalanche of criticism from sports writers. One suggested the Russian defenseman should go fight in Ukraine.

Tolerance is a curious banner because it demands attention, forbearance but not approval, and, at the same time, forbearance the other way, forbearance with someone who disagrees. Tolerance is a two-way street.

Advocacy is not.

The results have not been pretty. The sports writers have asked Provorov be benched, called his religion 'archaic,' and criticized his ethnicity. And, of course, he's a bigot.

Forbearance without approval is essential in this culture because every citizen is equal before the law, with his own value. So each citizen emerges onto the cultural-political stage with a value he does not have to prove. Tolerance is not desirable, it is essential in this modern world of identity. It affirms the individual's value and by-passes his religion, race, origin, or language as acceptable, peripheral add-ons.

When these personal characteristics become evangelical and demand approval, things change. No one is annoyed with a Jehovah's Witness until he shows up at your door and interrupts the football game.

Interestingly, after the spat, Provorov's jerseys sold out of the NHL store.

Sportsmanship, Business, and Entertainment

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”--Kissinger

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Long Island Rep.-elect George Santos is being pilloried for lying on his resume. 

A politician is being criticized for lying.

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The Biden administration just cleared a Chinese company to own 370 acres of land within 12 miles of Grand Forks Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Sounds reasonable.

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Eunoia is the shortest word in English with all five vowels.

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Sportsmanship, Business, and Entertainment

Colorado Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar is one of the best defensemen in the NHL. It remains open to debate whether he will be allowed to be a sportsman.

During the Avalanche's 1-0 win over the New York Islanders on Monday night, Makar appeared to be tripped as he was skating with the puck out of his own zone. His fall brought an immediate penalty call from the backside referee who naturally assumed he had been tripped by Islanders forward Mathew Barzal.

Makar immediately objected, telling the official that Barzal did not trip him, that he had fallen on his own.

The referees huddled, and then decided that there would be no penalty called on the play.

A sportsman, right?

But, Makar essentially negated a two-minute penalty advantage for his team. And he said after the fact that he felt guilty doing it because he was afraid he was going to let his teammates down while adding “I don’t know if it’s something I’ll do again.”

Sportsmanship has its downside.

More, officials do not like getting shown up by players, and players that have a tendency to dive or embellish do not always get the benefit of the doubt on calls. Lord knows what will happen if the players start taking the higher road with them.

I wouldn't look for another outbreak of sportsmanship to strike again soon.

WTA Courage

WTA Courage

Commentators often bore people to tears about 'nerves' and 'anxiety' as factors in high-level women's tennis. But WTA courage is leaving men's sports far behind. 

The Women’s Tennis Association said Wednesday that it would halt all of its tournaments in China because it isn’t satisfied that Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai is safe following an allegation of sexual assault against a retired senior government official made last month on her verified social-media account.
Though the decision could cost women’s tennis hundreds of millions of dollars in future revenue, WTA Chief Executive Steve Simon said he would willingly cut off one of the sport’s largest business partners until Ms. Peng’s status was clarified.
Other sports organizations, such as the National Basketball Association and soccer’s English Premier League, have previously found themselves in conflict with China over various matters, usually integrity vs. profit. Integrity is usually defeated handily. But the WTA’s move to suspend the nine tournaments it has scheduled there for next year appears to be unprecedented in global sports. Brave and laudable.

And the Olympics in China is coming. (much from WSJ via Don)

Sports TV

 

The popularity of TV sports is the topic of a lot of debate. Has it lost its social element? Its diversion element? Is there some hierarchy here that is being revealed in restaurants?

Decline in sports viewership is not just the NBA.:

• US Open (golf) final round: down 56%
• US Open (tennis) was down 45% and the French open is down 57% so far
• Kentucky Derby: down 43%
• Indy 500: down 32%
• Through four weeks, NFL viewership is down approximately 10%
• NHL Playoffs were down 39% (Pre Stanley Cup playoffs was down 28% while the Stanley Cup was down 61%).
• NBA finals are down 45% (so far). Conference finals were down 35%, while the first round was 27% down. To match the viewership, activity on the NBA reddit fan community is also down 50% from the NBA finals last year.

Stats and Lowry

 

                            Stats and Lowry

A regular NBA game has about 90 shots per team, or 180 all together. Let’s say, generously, each shot takes about two seconds (a period of time that also includes almost every rebound and assist too). That’s 360 seconds, or a nice tidy six minutes, that overwhelm the box score. Those six minutes make almost every highlight, GIF, and meme from the sport. The players who excel in those six minutes make the most money, have the biggest endorsement deals, and are must-gets for your fantasy team. 

Meanwhile, two teams x five players x 48 minutes means a game is 480 minutes of work. Six minutes is 1.25 percent of the time. That massive 98.75 percent of the game is “little things.” 

From an article on Kyle Lowry that argues this:

In this year’s playoffs, we’ve seen a tale of two Raptors: the team with Kyle Lowry and the team without. If you watch every second Lowry has been on the floor, you’ll see a Toronto cakewalk. They have a shot at a title outscoring opponents by eight points per 100 possessions. If, on the other hand, you watch the minutes Lowry has been on the bench, it’s just about a tie, and the Raptors are not elite at all.

This might be surprising for a player who—when you mash his box-score stats together into PER, emerges as the 57th best player in the NBA this season (somewhere beneath Marquese Chriss, D’Angelo Russell, and Dwight Howard). It’s less surprising if you look at any team-performance based stat. Real Plus-Minus ranks 400 or so NBA players every season. This year, Lowry finished sixth overall, ahead of players like Kawhi Leonard, Luka Doncic, Jayson Tatum, Joel Embiid, Damian Lillard, Jimmy Butler, and Anthony Davis. And it’s no outlier. By that same measure, Lowry’s average finish over the last five years had been fourth in the entire league.

The thing is, we tend to measure basketball performance with things we are used to tracking, like points and rebounds. Kyle Lowry is OK at those things, and was great in Game 6. But if he’s a top five or 10 NBA player at winning, while being only OK at those easy-to-measure things … he must be a genius at the other things, which we often mistakenly call little things.

Pittsburgh Pirates Jarrod Dyson Picked Off at Second

On the eighteenth of August, in Pittsburgh in the time of the Plague, with the score 3-3 and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth, the Pirate's centerfielder, Jarrod Dyson, the winning run, was picked off second base by the catcher. This amazing event was reported nationally as follows:

"Pittsburgh Pirates Jarrod Dyson Picked Off at Second



Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder Guillermo Heredia (5) reacts after being picked off at second base in the ninth inning.
The Pirates had a chance to win it in the ninth when they put runners and first and second with no outs. But speedy Jarrod Dyson was picked off second base by catcher Roberto Perez and the inning eventually ended when Nick Wittgren (1-0) struck out Josh Bell with two on."

While such an event might astonish the average fan, the reporting is more important. The article identifies the player picked off at second as two different guys, first Dyson and then Heredia. Accuracy in the Press is not a high priority but this error is more understandable than most. The Pirates actually do not have a set lineup. In fact in two games I have seen, two separate players who have never played in the outfield before have played center field. 28 pitchers have pitched for them so far in this short season. The Yankees do not have names on their jerseys because everyone knows who they are, the Pirates have names because no one knows who they are and even then can't tell.

I have no problem with the Nuttings making a buck with a small market team. I wish only that they were better at it. The problem here is that every team must have a few capable players to be a real team rather than a group of imposters. Center field is one of those positions. You are morally obligated to have a centerfielder, a catcher and a shortstop. 

Perhaps a social action group should show up at Nutting's house and demand a center fielder.

P3

                                                             P3

An article popped up on Microsoft News about the Peak Performance Project (P3) in Santa Barbara, California. They are investigating the science of movement. And they have started exactly where you would have guessed.

Dr. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard-trained physician and founder of P3, has seen the data and – he believes – the future.
“We understand these athletes and how they’re going to perform on an NBA court before they set foot on an NBA court,” Elliott says.
“All of these kids going through this NBA Draft – including Zion Williamson and R.J. Barrett from Duke (University) – have been coming to see us since they were 16, 17 years old. With our data, we can give them injury-risk models and performance models to help guide their career development,” Elliott says. “Nobody has this biomechanical information on them. We have years of it."

Launched in 2006, P3 is the first facility to apply a more data-driven approach to understanding how elite competitors move. It uses advanced sports-science strategies to assess and train athletes in ways that will revolutionize pro sports – and, eventually, the bodies and abilities of weekend warriors, Elliott says.
“We are challenging them and measuring them. But we’re not interested in how high they jump or how fast they accelerate,” Elliott says. “We’re interested in the mechanics of how they jump, how they accelerate and decelerate. It’s helping us unlock the secrets of human movement.”

Working directly with players and their agents or families, P3 has evaluated members of the past six NBA draft classes, amassing a database of more than 600 current and former NBA athletes.
P3 outfitted its lab with a high-speed camera system manufactured by Simi Reality Motion Systems GmbH, a German company from the ZF Group and a Microsoft partner.
Simi offers markerless, motion-capture software that removes the need for athletes to wear tracking sensors while they play or train. Simi also works with seven Major League Baseball clubs, deploying high-speed camera systems to those stadiums to record every pitch during every game since the 2017 season.

Simi’s software digitizes the pitchers’ arm angles and related body movements, spanning 42 different joint centers across 24,000 pitches thrown per team per season. That produces hundreds of billions of data points that are uploaded and processed on Microsoft Azure, enabling teams to create in-depth biomechanical analyses for the players, says Pascal Russ, Simi’s CEO.
“The first team that deploys this effectively on the field to pick lineups or to see which pitch angles worked well against which batters is going to see a huge separation between them and the other teams not using this,” Russ says.

“It’s freakishly accurate.”

While Russ foresees this technology eventually remaking baseball, such seismic shifts already are occurring in the NBA through P3’s player assessments, says Benedikt Jocham, Simi’s U.S. chief operations officer.
“We provide the software solution that can quantify the movement and analyze, for example, how much pressure and torque a person is putting on various body parts,” Jocham says. “P3 adds the magic sauce. They are wizards at figuring out what it all means and making sense out of it for athletes.”

After the cameras record a player’s movements in the P3 lab, those datasets are loaded into Azure where machine-learning algorithms reveal how that player’s physical systems are most related to other NBA players who were similarly assessed. The algorithm then assigns that player into one of several clusters or branches that predict how their basketball career may unfold, Elliott says.

One branch, for example, contains athletes who had a brief NBA experience and never became significant players. Another branch encompasses players who were impactful during their first three or four seasons then sustained serious injuries that depleted their skills. In still another branch, players share rare combinations of length, power and force that fed elite careers – and they remained healthy.

The data is also helping to shatter long-held theories that successful NBA players who, at first glance, lack the size, jumping ability or quickness of traditional stars are merely compensating by tapping unmeasurable intangibles such as “intuition” or “IQ” or “heart.”
“That’s how people once would have defined (2017-18 NBA most valuable player) James Harden, as somebody who just has this super-high basketball IQ,” Elliott says. “Maybe he does. But he also has a better stopping or braking system than anybody we’ve ever assessed in the NBA.

Case in point: Dallas Mavericks rookie Luka Doncic. In its pre-draft assessment of Doncic one year ago, P3 identified that same hidden performance metric – the elite ability to stop quickly. P3 knew, before his NBA Draft, that Doncic and Harden were in the same player branch. Doncic posted a stunning first pro season.

Every NBA player or draft prospect assessed by P3 receives a report that highlights their injury risks and compares them to league peers based on performance.

Eventually, this same information may become available to amateur athletes and everyone else, Elliott says. The same technologies could predict, for example, that a weekend warrior has too much force going through the left leg while jumping or landing plus a tiny but unhealthy rotation of the left knee and femur, causing too much friction, and, eventually, an erosion of the left knee cartilage.

“What if you identified that when you were 30 or 20, instead of learning when you’re 50 that your cartilage is gone? That really is the future,” Elliott says.

I'll be surprised if we don't see this used by teams like the Pirates, who are always substituting technology and schemes for talent. 

Where was Cole?

In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity.--Sowell

Chris thought the penitentiary in Philly was fascinating. 

Penitentiary (n.)early 15c., "place of punishment for offenses against the church," from Medieval Latin penitentiaria, from fem. of penitentiarius (adj.) "of penance," from Latin paenitentia "penitence" (see penitence). Meaning "house of correction" (originally an asylum for prostitutes) is from 1806, short for penitentiary house (1776). Slang shortening pen is attested from 1884.

According to Chris, the Eastern State Penitentiary took this literally and every prisoner was kept in monk-like isolation and contemplative silence. Fearing it could become an organizing factor among criminals, no inmate ever saw another and they were admitted and discharged hooded.

The Chicago Cubs are moving on from shortstop Addison Russell, non-tendering the shortstop Monday.

Williams found that less-experienced umpires often performed better than veterans in ball-strike performance. Moreover, Williams found that there was typically little change in an umpire’s year-to-year missed call rates, suggesting that improving umpiring skills is difficult. The average service time of all MLB umpires this year was 16 years. 

There is a new, updated Andromeda Strain that is getting good reviews. Written by the guy who wrote Robopocalypse which I thought was really pretty bad.

The UK’s Apostrophe Protection Society has closed down because its frustrated chairman said that “ignorance and laziness” had won in regard to the proper use of the apostrophe.
 
For the late author Ayn Rand … the essential meaning of Thanksgiving was “a celebration of successful production.” The lavish meal, she wrote, is “a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride – just as it is the pride of American parents that their children never know starvation.”--Kirkpatrick



I think this Yang guy is interesting and smart but this ad gives him away--if he's responsible for it. Economies are not built, they evolve. They are emergent, not designed. Anyone who thinks an economy can be built should be exiled to the Nineteenth Century.

This week, the U.S. national debt reached the 23 trillion dollar mark for the first time ever.  There was no fanfare, there were no politicians giving speeches about fiscal responsibility, and there has been very little national outrage.  We have simply come to accept that it is “normal.” I am unsure how much damage fossil fuel will hurt the next generations but I am certain that debt will.

An explosion at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, on December 3, 1984, led to the worst industrial accident in history. At least 2,000 people died and another 200,000 were injured when toxic gas enveloped the city.
And eleven people, including three high-school students, were killed on December 3, 1979, when a crowd of general-admission ticket-holders to a Cincinnati Who concert surged forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime unreserved seats inside.

                                   Where was Cole?

A basic tenet of writing is to create tension. Drama. Conflict. It is a staple from Hamlet to 90 Day Fiancé. I read Column of Fire by Follett recently and in the middle of the religious upheavals in Elizabethan England, he creates a conflict on every page.
So, in the denouement of one of the most memorable World Series in history, the announcer asks, "Where is Cole?" Shouldn't Cole, he asked, a pitcher who has not pitched in relief since college and needs four days rest between starts, pitch in relief for the Astros in their final game?
Conflict. Drama. The game wasn't enough. Every minute demands a narrative.

Different Times, Same Guys

This is socialism now: From each faction according to its vulnerability, to each faction according to its ability to confiscate.--Will

Mineo's, a bar full of total strangers, was organized by Chris to sing "Happy 
Birthday" to me last night.
Carol came home from her dinner meeting looking completely spent.
Ned had a talk with Advish, an old Kiski guy who is in the Air Force space program and he is really worried about China.

At Harvard, many students recently denounced the Crimson, its student newspaper,  for seeking comment from Immigration and Custom Enforcement on a story that disputed its practices.

“We need to build a firewall in our brains,” China's state media has said. What exactly does that mean? Surveillance cameras are focused on all individual students in Hangzhou classrooms, analyzing faces and moods. The data is sent to a terminal for each student’s attitude to be assessed.

Lotto winner Michael Carroll reveals he has a new job working as a £10-an-hour coalman after blowing his £9.7million jackpot. He described the ten years of blowing his multi-million fortune on drink, drugs and brothels as 'the best ten years of my life'.  

The commitment to “social justice” has, in fact, become the chief outlet for moral emotion, the distinguishing attribute of the good man, and the recognized sign of the possession of a moral conscience….. But the near-universal acceptance of a belief does not prove that it is valid or even meaningful any more than the general belief in witches or ghosts proved the validity of those concepts. What we have to deal with in the case of “social justice” is simply a quasi-religious superstition of the kind which we should respectfully leave in peace so long as it merely makes those happy who hold it, but which we must fight when it becomes the pretext of coercing other men. And the prevailing belief in “social justice” is at its present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization.--Hayek

Bezos is reportedly interested in acquiring the Seattle Seahawks, whose stadium sits just 1.5 miles away from Amazon’s headquarters.

Shortly after the stunning US presidential election in 2016, French journalist François Busnel, with a lifelong love for American literature, seized the political moment to give American authors a platform to express themselves in what would become a 200-page magazine called America—in French.

On November 18, 1978, Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones led hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American nation of Guyana. Many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final death toll at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those who died were children.

               Different Times, Same Guys

The recent behavior of Garrett in the Browns-Steelers game made me think of another episode where a player attacked another with a weapon, the Steeler's John Henry Johnson.

John Henry Johnson remains fifth on Pittsburgh’s all-time rushing list with 4,383 yards. He was a hard runner and a vicious blocker. Myron Cope, the legendary Steelers broadcaster, in a 1963 Saturday Evening Post piece described John Henry breaking a teammate’s jaw in two places during an intrasquad scrimmage in Calgary of the CFL. “Jeez, John,” screamed the team’s general manager, “was that thing really necessary?” “Well,” John Henry responded, “What do you want me to do? Kiss the guy or tackle him?”

In 1961, Pittsburgh, down 24-17, was trying to salvage a tie when the Rams’ Eddie Meador picked off a Bobby Layne pass and started heading for the end zone. Pat Livingston of the Pittsburgh Press described what happened next: The brawling started when [running back] John Henry Johnson knocked Meador out of bounds on the Steeler[s] 7. Johnson was hit from behind and knocked down by linebacker Bill Jobko and got up swinging the goal-line marker. The marker hit Jobko on the head but, luckily, the Ram was protected by the helmet he wore. It was enough to empty both benches, though. Johnson emerged from the scrap with “a deep cut” on his nose, Jack Sell of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Naturally, he was none too pleased about it. “They were roughing me up all day,” he said. “They were dirty as hell. I don’t have to take it, and I won’t.” (Years later, a story in the Post-Gazette revealed: “The Rams punished Johnson with a series of late hits in retaliation for Johnson having broken the jaw of Ram[s] linebacker Les Richter on a block earlier in the game.”) 

John Henry was not discriminating with his ill will, spreading it around the league. Breaking the Giants’ Eddie Hughes cheekbone with a block, John Henry remembers, “He was real nice about it. He told me ‘good block’ when I visited him in the hospital.” As recounted in Cope’s Broken Cigars, Johnson fractured the skull of the Chicago Cardinals’ Charlie Trippi, on a downfield block. The Chicago mob reportedly offered to put a contract on him, but was dissuaded by Trippi, who said, “I didn’t think it would be in the best interests of professional football.” 

Injuring his knee after only three carries in the 1965 opener, Johnson never again played for the Steelers. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1987. (a couple of sources)

Supererogatory Complexities

“It’s really hard to think of a human tragedy of this scale outside civil war. This will be a touchstone of disastrous policies for decades to come.”---Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, on Venezuela. 

Chris made good pizza last night. Am I the only guy who thinks The Night King looks like David Losi?

Many of the Pirates are professional ballplayers.
McCutchen has a torn ACL.

Will, on aesthetic reasons for impeachment: "What can accurately be called aesthetic considerations are, however, powerfully germane. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 65, impeachable offenses should "relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself." Trump's incessant lying and increasingly contemptible coarseness are as reprehensible as was Richard Nixon's surreptitious criminality. And -- because they are constant, public and hence desensitizing -- they will inflict more long-term damage to America's civic life than Nixon's misdeeds did."

With London's murder rate higher than New York City's, Mayor Sadiq Khan has implemented knife control policies as violent crime surges. Khan deployed over 300 additional London police officers to stop and search anyone they suspect is carrying a knife. 


On this day in 1968  Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate, was shot three times in a hail of gunfire in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Five others were wounded. The senator had just completed a speech celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary.

                        Supererogatory Complexities

Caster Semenya won an interim ruling in her battle against the IAAF and its testosterone regulations when the Swiss supreme court ordered athletics' governing body to suspend the rules on Monday. The freezing of the rules allows the two-time Olympic champion from South Africa to run in her favorite 800-meter event without taking any hormone suppressing medication, although the temporary ruling can be challenged by the IAAF. The IAAF's testosterone limits apply to female athletes with conditions known as "differences of sex development" (DSD). The IAAF says the athletes affected have levels of testosterone in the male range and gain an athletic advantage from their elevated levels of the muscle-building hormone. To be eligible to compete in certain events, the athletes must lower their testosterone to below a point specified by the IAAF through medication or surgery.


Margaret Wambui


Caster Semenya


And, on the other hand, Stefka Kostadinova, the world record holder in the high jump--one of the world's longest standing records--and mother of the apparently less distinguished Nikolay:



 



 

Nationalism Vs. Patriotism, Shiffrin, Poverty Stats and the SSI

This month is Transgender Awareness Month at the VA.

"A free society is better today than a corrupt and totalitarian one. But one hundred years from now, the difference in human welfare and other relevant values will prove far more pronounced." This observation from Cowen is important: Like compounding interest, freedom's benefits grow exponentially with time.


Wise financial advice:
http://simplyrich.com/seven-steps-to-financial-peace-of-mind/

Orwell wrote that nationalism was ‘the worst enemy of peace.’ We are hearing now from the Europeans that nationalism--particularly American nationalism--is a great threat to us all. It is strange that this concern should be coming from the Europeans, the people who virtually invented nationalism. And it seems to imply a misunderstanding of it. Nationalism is sometimes benign, sometimes dangerous, but is always organizing, xenophobic and foreword looking. It has a motive. But what the Europeans usually complain of--at least in Americans--is closer to patriotism. Patriotism is pride in one's country and its heritage, respect for how your country was formed or has behaved. It has no opinion about others and is motiveless.
Perhaps this misunderstanding explains the terrible problems the Europeans have had with nationalism in the past. And, perhaps, the confusing view the Europeans have of America where the Americans are accused of both nationalism and disinterest in world affairs. And the European reaction to America reminds one of another important dichotomy: The distinction between jealousy and envy. Envy is "unhappiness over the success of others."

Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people this question in 2013: Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years?
Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.

Mikaela Shiffrin capped the best year of her career by setting yet another milestone Saturday, overtaking one of her childhood idols to become the most successful female slalom skier in the 52-year history of the World Cup.

In the last race of 2018, the American added her 36th victory. Shiffrin previously shared the record with Austria's Marlies Raich, who, competing as Marlies Schild, won 35 times before retiring in 2014.

By winning Saturday, Shiffrin also became the first skier, male or female, to win 15 World Cup races in a single calendar year, moving one victory past men's overall champion Marcel Hirscher of Austria, who has won 14 times in 2018.

The Egyptians have really savage security.
Egyptian security forces have killed 40 "suspected militants" in three separate incidents in North Sinai and Giza, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday, a day after a bombing on a Vietnamese tourist bus in Giza killed four people.
The bombing, less than 4 km from the pyramids, on the outskirts of Cairo, is the first deadly attack against foreign tourists in Egypt for more than a year and comes as the tourism sector, a vital source of foreign currency, recovers from a sharp drop in visitor numbers since the country's 2011 uprising.

Penalty Kicks and Saves

In the spirit of the World Cup:


For most professional soccer games, the average number of goals scored is around 2.5 a game so penalty kicks, with their high success rate, are crucial to the game's outcome.

 

Research headed by Michael Bar-Eli at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel makes some interesting conclusions about how goal keepers should defend penalty kicks.
They analyzed hundreds of penalty kicks over a season, including only shots on goal. (Importantly they left out missed shots, which has some implication to their results.) 85% of the penalty shots placed on goal were successful. A bit more than half of the shots taken were placed in the lower one-third of the goal (57%). These low attempts were successful about 80% of the time. By comparison, only 13% of shots were placed in the upper third of the goal. However, all of these shots resulted in a goal scored (100% success).
Slightly more shots were placed to the goal keeper’s right side compared to the center or left. (The handedness of the shooter was not compiled.) Of these three directions, kickers were most successful when shooting at the center of the goal. Shots aimed at the center of the goal were successful 87% of the time compared to an 83% success rate for shots placed at the outer thirds of the goal. (Again, only shots on goal were analyzed; missed shots were not included.)

Professional penalty kick shooters most often place the ball at the lower right corner of the goal (40% of attempts). However, they are far more successful when shooting at the upper portion.(But I'll bet they miss more often there.)
In attempting to stop the penalty kick, goal keepers jump to the right or left 94% of the time. In doing this, they guess correctly only about 40% of the time (i.e. jump left, shot placed left). However, even when they guess correctly, they only stop 25-30% of the shots. The most intriguing part of the Dr. Bar-Eli’s analyses is that when goal keepers remain in the center of the goal and the shot is placed in the center, they make the save 60% of the time. Given that about 30% of penalty kicks are placed in the center third of the goal, remaining stationary in the center of the goal increases the keepers chances of stopping the shot from about 13% to more than 33%.

So why does the goalie move?

Interviews with goalies show their decision is based on the perceived need to “do something” rather than nothing. In sports, perhaps mistakes are more forgivable if they are made at full speed. Diving to the left or right gives the appearance of effort and avoids the perception that he/or she didn’t attempt to make a save. In fact, a survey of goal keepers show that the vast majority feel worse if a goal is scored when they remain central versus diving to the left or right.

The invariable comparison to life and business occurs here. (For example, the success of "robot trading" might be the elimination of such an "action bias.")

Despite the need to make a heroic effort, some situations may require doing less rather than more.

Waiting for Kurtenbach

The Wilson play recently reminded me of the unspoken rules of old time hockey.

Years ago in Montreal my classmates were introducing me to the game. We would all go on Wednesday early and get standing room tickets and watch the Montreal Canadians, a great team at the time. One night the Canadians were getting badly beaten by the Leafs; a local hero who played for the Leafs got all three goals and the crowd had turned against the home team. Late in the period a Leafs rookie--Malone, I think--scored, his first in his career. He was thrilled and sought out the puck as a keepsake. A defenseman, furious at the turn of events, dropped his gloves and sucker-punched him in the face, knocking him unconscious.

The crowd around me went silent, then everyone stood.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"That was a terrible foul," I was told--even if  by the home team.

"But what is everyone doing?"

"Waiting for Orland Kurtenbach."

"What's that," I asked.

"Toronto's fighting center.' (Apparently a rare breed.)

"What are they waiting for?"

My companion looked at me curiously. "For justice, " he said.

Indeed, moments later, Orland Kurtenbach came over the boards, he and the defenseman (Terry Harper, I think,) met in front of the net, squared off and Kurtenbach knocked him unconscious with a professional looking left hook.

Projected Lineup

This is an expert's idea of the opening day lineup of the Pirates:

Projected Lineup
LINEUP
2B     Josh Harrison (R)
CF     Starling Marte (R)
1B     Josh Bell (S)
RF     Gregory Polanco (L)
3B     David Freese (R)
LF     Jose Osuna (R)
C     Francisco Cervelli (R)
SS     Jordy Mercer (R)

BENCH
C     Elias Diaz (R)
3B   Colin Moran (L)
UT   Adam Frazier (L)
UT   Sean Rodriguez (R)
OF   Jordan Luplow (R)

ROTATION
RHP     Jameson Taillon
RHP     Ivan Nova
RHP     Chad Kuhl
RHP     Trevor Williams
RHP     Joe Musgrove

BULLPEN
LHP     Felipe Rivero
RHP     Daniel Hudson
RHP    Michael Feliz
RHP     George Kontos
RHP     A.J. Schugel
RHP    Kyle Crick
LHP    Steven Brault

Steeler-Bengal

The athlete, as everyone in life, walks a fine line. How far should he go? What is too much and where should he hold back?

The recent Steeler-Bengal game was a case in point. Strangely the game turned on an accident: Ryan Shazier, a talented player from the Steelers, had a spinal injury from a rather innocuous play. Things degenerated quickly. Toward the end of the game the Bengal's best defensive player was carried off the field and the Steeler's extraordinary wide-out was hit on a play that differed little from assault. The widely advertised blood feud had come true.
But there was another element not emphasized: There were several moments when players erred on the other side, where they did not play at all. Jackson, a defensive back, went out of his way not to hit Bell--even raising his hands to prove he had not hit him, and the Steeler running back promptly ran 30 yards to score. On the other side, the Steeler linebacker, Dupree, stopped mid-tackle with his arms around the Bengal quarterback and allowed him to complete a crucial long pass. In a game of terrible excess, some on the sidelines were certainly being criticized for their restraint.

 

Football is strangely anthropological. There is a tendency to view it in present terms and in historical context, like catcalls to girls on the street. Decades ago the game was certainly more vicious; the old Oakland-Pittsburgh games were Roman in intensity and damage. But this game today is different. These men are bigger, faster, better armored, better trained and the field of play is no bigger. Jack Lambert is too small to play now. Some of the Steeler offensive linemen in their heyday weighed less than 210 after a game. Ryan Shazier is 6'1, 230 lbs. and runs a 4.36 40 yard dash. He has leveraged himself into a missile of muscle, bone and ligament. The old players hurt others with bad intent, now they hurt each other with simple physics. With their blood up they can do terrible damage at any moment whereas years ago Jack Tatum had to look for his spot.

 

There was a lot wrong with this game. The Steelers were clearly unhinged with the Shazier injury--for which the Bengals were not responsible but which did echo previous faults--and seemed to sleepwalk through the first half. They came back in the second with a vengeance. The announcers got uncomfortable. The referees got symbolic, which only raised the intensity of the players. With Burfict's injury caused by a rookie wideout, the problem should be clear. Without some internal restraint in this game, no one is safe. Yet, at the same time, the self-imposed restraint of Jackson and Dupree will be criticized.

 

With the changing sensibilities of the culture, the Naturalistic Fallacy may not be enough to save this game.

ESports

As if things were not bad enough. Professional sports leagues "officially have a millennial problem," writes VentureBeat, citing some interesting findings from L.E.K. Consulting. Some of the observations include:

• 40% of millennials prefer watching esports to traditional sports
• 26% of millennial eSports enthusiasts reported a significant uptick in eSports viewing over the past year
• 61% of esports followers said they spent less time watching TV over the past 12 months, and 45% said they had cut back on traditional sports viewing
• Together millennials -- ages 17-34 -- and Generation Z peers -- age 16 and under -- comprise 45% of America's consumer base

 

"At a certain point, this comes down to a new form of media better serving an upcoming generation of consumers," concludes VentureBeat. "Esports leagues are all online. Most matches stream for free on sites like Twitch. They are available on the web or through smartphone apps. Competitive gaming is easily accessible, and it lives where Millennials are already spending their time."

Maybe that's why Major League Baseball's video streaming company recently paid $300 million for the right to stream League of Legends through 2023.

Liston and Race

A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat.

Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob connected. He knocked out the extremely popular Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sports writer later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.
 

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Tyler Matakevich

Champions of the underdog will be watching Tyler Matakevich tonight. He is a linebacker drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers at the 246 position. He is hanging on to the Steeler roster as the Steelers decide on one more linebacker to keep. He has had a good camp but the odds are against him.

Matakevich is coming off a season in which he swept college football's major awards recognizing the nation's top defensive player (the Chuck Bednarik and Bronko Nagurski awards), and he was the soul of a Temple team that arguably was the best in the program's history. So why wasn't Matakevich drafted higher than 246th overall,

Matakevich, from the Combine:
6-feet tall, 238 pounds, 4.81 seconds in the 40-yard dash, 7.19 in the three-cone drill, 4.5 in the 20-yard shuttle, 112 inches in the broad jump and 31 inches in the vertical jump.

‌• Only five of 31 linebackers who ran the 40 did so in a slower time than Matakevich.

‌• Only four of 16 linebackers who ran the three-cone drill did so in a slower time than Matakevich.

‌• Only five of 20 linebackers who ran the 20-yard shuttle did so in a slower time than Matakevich.

‌• Only four of 32 linebackers had a worse broad jump than Matakevich.

‌• Only eight of 32 linebackers had a worse vertical jump than Matakevich.

What the Olympics Really Says About Us

An illness of unknown potential is endemic in Brazil. Gold medalist Ryan Lochte  has reportedly been held up at gunpoint during a party in Rio. Countless people are uprooted to build these Olympic villages every time they are built. Over one million people lost their homes for the 2008 Beijing games alone. Brazil has similarly evicted large numbers of people for the current Olympics in Rio, and even more to build the stadiums for the 2014 World Cup. Usually these efforts lose money; a single exception is the privately funded Los Angeles Olympics. But they are very good for propaganda to pump up the appearance of the host country, particularly despotic ones. This all asks the obvious question: Why is there not a permanent Olympic site? It would help the athletes, the people, the economics...so, why not?
Because the politicians, their bureaucracies and their cronies could not take as much advantage of the situation. As always, the political infrastructure trumps everything else. And this is for games; imagine what it is like for conflict.
Brotherhood. Sportsmanship. Safety of the athletes. Safety of the world, for that matter. All as phony as a gymnast's smile.
The Olympics are a metaphor for our lives.